forgot to say: the circle face DOES NOT WORK. If one uses anything other than Graphics primatives or directives in create, it fails with the message "is not a type of graphics"
the example of the circle face was neat though - MakeBoxes is important to know of and i had no idea TypeSet`MakeBoxes would work in places MakeBoxes would not !!
difficult to get help yes and no. Mathematica 4.0 documented it and included the code for it for all to see - and earlier versions had even more of Mathematica in .m format. the Wolfram Library still has many .m to find (to help old notebooks to work). But as for understanding it.
it can be hard to remember pertinent things when the sun is moving and one is "stuck" waiting for a soln.
John M. Novak, Roman Meader are good code writers. /usr/local/mathematica/AddOns/StandarPackages/Graphics.m
In[2230]:= Unprotect[Graphics]
Out[2230]= {"Graphics"}
In[2231]:= Graphics[{___, f[x_], ___}] := If[y, Print@x, {}]
In[2232]:= Protect[Graphics]
Out[2232]= {"Graphics"}
In[2235]:= g = Graphics[{f["hi"]}]
Out[2235]= If[y, Print["hi"], {}]
in the above Graphics did not complain that f[] is not a type of Graphics
however what must have happened is that i tried an example f[] (earlier before asking question) and believed it hadn't worked ( probably forgetting parenthesis or something which caused a pattern miss and me to be mislead to think it hadn't worked)
btw thank you for the URL on Import that helped allot. I wouldn't have though looking for it in Tutorials - I'm new to Mathematica 11.0 and still tend to use it as if it's Mathematica 4.0 (which has no guides to find)